You never know what you’ll find when you’re out picking for antiques. My friend recently showed me this vintage life-sized stuffed Santa Claus and made me a buy-it-today offer I couldn’t refuse. Now he’s sitting in my Grandma’s old mechanical reclining chair, waiting for cookies. His plastic side-eye, grinning face, is simultaneously creepy and endearing. His beard is epic and the color of his suit is bright and tight.
Along with the wreath on our front door, he is the first decorative touch to grace our home this season. He was here on Thanksgiving, patiently waiting for the trees to be put up, lit and decorated. He’s still waiting. Outside, with the repeated dustings of snowflakes, the north woods are already decorated. The color and music are coming from the hardy songbirds that are denizens of the boreal forest.
When you’re in the woods the snow doesn’t really fall silently, it has a type of comforting music to it, like nature’s ASMR. Google returns this definition for those of you not familiar: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a tingling sensation that typically begins on the scalp and moves down the back of the neck and upper spine. This feeling, often accompanied by a sense of calm and relaxation. Not as obvious as waves crashing, wind blowing or rain on a tin roof, but definitely calming.
A whiskey jack, a nuthatch, a chickadee, a redpoll, pine siskin or junco, a crispy brown fallen leaf or branch too heavy from the snow. These subtle notes fall all around when your crunching snowboots stop long enough for you to listen. I like to stand and close my eyes and mentally record everything that my ears “see.” As I take time to do this, I can both time travel and space travel to the Illinois forests of my youth where tufted titmouse and a plethora of striped chipmunks and huge gray squirrels join us.
I used to go out into the woods and make little windbreak shelters from branches and leaves and fallen trunks and dead brush. If I could keep the cold ground dry enough to keep me warm for a few minutes, I’d sit down and watch as well as listen. We lived close to the highway so I’d have to filter those sounds of tires on pavement out, but I was used to spending Summer afternoons reading novel after novel in the middle of those woods, so that didn’t matter.
Looking back now, I can see that these were formulative moments where I learned more about the creative process than I knew. Artistic creation is not always, and most often not, fully about the stroke of the brush and the covering of the transformative canvas. Obviously those things have to happen for there to be a painting, however, when you’re staring at a blank canvas, or a blank page, there always comes a moment when you have to see beyond the whiteout of the storm of nothing and listen to what is actually all around that moment, waiting, like vintage stuffed Santa, for the creativity to come to life… The imperceptible sound of a bird track being laid down, the bark of a red pine being rubbed against another up above in the canopy as the wind pushes them around, the percussive beat of woodpeckers and the occasional drumming of grouse. These are the rhythms of the stories that reside in my head. Not all of them are mine, I share many of them with souls I may never see like the footfalls of timberwolf and the snoring of a black bear in her den, with the silent water pushed by swimming otters and beavers under the ice, with the air swum through by eagles and ravens soaring overhead, not to mention the red-backed voles and shrews within the subnivean zones underneath the layers of snow.
You never know what you’ll hear after the iconic song of the white-throated sparrow leaves the north woods in the fall and where those sounds might lead you. Like the loon, though, they will suddenly appear if you wait long enough for the right moment.
